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6/19/2018

How I saved 600€/year on Redsmin building a reusable payment micro-service

Original post on blog.redsmin.com

Like any SaaS business, Redsmin has to manage customer payments. To that end, I always use Stripe, an online payment gateway with an awesome developer experience (DX).

1 year after Redsmin’s initial launch, back in December 2014, I also subscribed to Stunning to manage pre-dunning, dunning email and easily set up a page allowing my clients to update their payment details.

However, when I took a look at my fixed expenses over the past 4 years, I noticed that a nonanecdotal part of our fixed expenses were directly allocated to Stunning. As I launch almost one new SaaS business every year, and that Image-Charts’ customers were already asking me to update their credit card information, I had to take action. Either buy another Stunning account or do-what-I-always-do: build from scratch a service that handles it for me… Thus migrating Redsmin from Stunning to this new service written from scratch.

That's how the idea to build a reusable piece of software came to mind: Stripe-update-card was born.

As I'm progressively moving my stack from NodeJS ecosystem to Rust, I had to fix some issues on stripe-rs library. Besides this, everything went fine and the service has been written and deployed on CleverCloud in a day (awesome service, give it a try!). Stripe-update-card on Github, PRs are welcome!

I wanted this microservice to be very simple yet fully customizable to be usable inin many products. It's already used in production at Redsmin, Image-Charts and will be deployed in the coming months on KillBug and GetSignature (but that’s another story).

Stripe-update-card’s form is fully customizable, only 3 environment variables are required to start the service (STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY, STRIPE_SECRET_KEY and SUCCESS_REDIRECT_URL). You can use the others to better promote your brand, product description, logo and so on.

docker run -it \
 -e STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY=pk_test_xxx \
 -e STRIPE_SECRET_KEY=sk_test_xxx \
 -e SUCCESS_REDIRECT_URL=https://url.to.redirect/on/success \
 -p 8080:8080 \
 fgribreau/stripe-update-card

I'm pretty sure other indie/SaaS hackers will find it useful (instead of rewriting it from scratch every time). If so, don't hesitate to reach out and please send a PR to update "Running in production" README section!

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Made with on a hot august night from an airplane the 19th of March 2017.